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Comment by lovecg | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious what was your estimate of the likelihood of what happened last Wednesday before it happened? Were your priors updated in any way since then?

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I can't speak for OP, but long before the election, I was expecting violence around the US if Trump lost.

I didn't predict an attack on the Capitol, but it didn't really surprise me, either.

I speak as a conservative who is aggressively anti-Trump but believes many of his voters would not condone what happened at the Capitol.

That's basically my thinking as well, for what it's worth.

Many may not support it, but nearly half do including many elected Republican politicians. This isn't a fringe Trump supporter issue, but a major issue within the Republican party and with American conservatism in general. Maybe the perception of conservatives being censored is just a reflection of the reality that they support using violence to obtain their goals at much, much higher rates than liberals do and are just suffering the consequences of their actions?

https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/

Thanks for the numbers. Good to see some evidence my hunch was right - I'd say 43% of the sample is "many".

YouGov speculates in their presentation of the data they gathered that perhaps more Republicans approved because they saw the actions as basically peaceful:

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

That belief strikes me as crazy, but if they genuinely didn't think there was violence going on, hard to read it as being okay with violence.

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